Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

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> 1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];

I keep hearing this and I just have a hard time believing it. Like okay maybe technically Saudi Arabia does have fewer people in prison than the US but that's because the punishment for theft is having your hand removed rather than going to jail, I guess yes technically that isn't prison, but generally in an elightened society we moved away from those methods of punishment for the most part. Then of course China, I mean China also consistently reported the lowest COVID numbers, and are their numbers including people all those Uighyr's that are undergoing "reeducation"?

Honestly every time I hear this I get the same feeling as when the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women condemns the US treatment of women's rights despite having on it's board such well known champions of Women's rights as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey. Something just seems to not smell quite right.

> ... Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey

A key issue in women's rights is reproductive freedom. To varying degrees, abortion is legal in every country you just mentioned. Abortion is generally allowed under Islam. Afghanistan and Pakistan have stricter laws than, say, Turkey but they have usable exceptions (life of th emother, life of the fetus) where the states in the US that have enacted abortion bans generally have the patina of exceptions. These are exceptions so vague and so strict that they're intended never to be used (eg [1]).

Russia has started limiting abortion access. India allows abortion.

So yes, by some measures, the countries you mentioned do, to varying degrees, have more freedom for women.

The issue I think is that many in the US have very skewed views of both how draconian and restrictive some US laws are and a warped view of life in Islamic and other non-Western countries.

Back to prisons, the US has roughly 2 million inmates [2], roughly 1% of the adult population and by every metric this makes the US the most carceral state on Earth. So why aren't we the safest?

[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/11/texas-abortion-lawsu...

[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html

It's easy to believe because the US is very good at commercializing and entrenching perverse profit motives, i.e. prison industrial complex and the US health sector knows how to extract more from bodies. The US was also rich/socially broken enough where locking up more people made political and economical sense (for some) and had decades of head start refining the process. Take PRC, Western estimates of Uyghur internment at 1/12 of population, or about lifetime internment of US blacks. Vast majority of mass internment was measured in months because they had to process prisoners through limited new facilities over a short period of time - the point was to filter problematic populations and find edge cases who were slapped with 10-20 year sentences. Majority was was released after a short stint. There's limit on how much country that intern on politics can extract value from industrializing prison, because they prefer not to have # dissidents get out of hand in the first place. Even coerced labour or organ harvesting is lame profit driver compared to the service jobs as a result of the US prison sector that benefits from countries having too much money. Most countries, especially developing countries, diverting people to lockup people is not productive use of resources, at least not for assembling widgets. PRC doesn't have the incentives to spend resources to lock up as large % of the population as the US in both scale and timelines involved. They spent trillions upfront to process the region so long term securitization doesn't involve expensive internment. Meanwhile, in the US, mass internment has become profitable, so it should not be surprising that US ends up imprisoning disproportionately more.

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